What a difference a year makes. In June 2023, when my family visited China, we had to deal with a complex Covid-19 declaration, rely on my daughter-in-law to pay for purchases using her WeChat account and go through two travel agents to get our rail tickets.

Since then, China has dispensed with pandemic regulations, greatly liberalised visas for foreign visitors, nudged second-tier hotels to accept foreign guests and, importantly, WeChat has opened its payment system to international credit cards.

China is clearly pushing to win over foreign tourists and their spending. According to the National Immigration Administration, the mainland attracted 14.6 million foreign visitors in the first half of 2024 – almost 1 million more than in the whole of 2023.

However, that number is still less than half the number from 2019. Clearly, Beijing has a way to go to restore pre-pandemic levels of tourists.

China faces structural barriers, particularly on air connectivity. The number of inbound flights is still far lower than before the pandemic. In June, China was served by 366 flights each week from the US. That is down by three-quarters from the 1,563 flights per week in January-June 2019.

At the same time, there is much China can do to attract more foreign tourists. One improvement would be to further refine its entry policies, as they still fall short of those in Thailand, for example.

Thailand allows visa-free entry to nationals of 93 countries and provides a visa-on-arrival service to another 31, including China. Last month, a visa-on-arrival scheme was introduced at Beijing airport, but that is limited to urgent cases. This should be opened up, and extended to all major international points of entry.

To begin with, it should also be available in Chengdu, Chongqing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, and be open to everyone, not just urgent cases. The Shenzhen facility would also help boost tourism in Hong Kong, a goal of the mainland government.

Another area ripe for improvement is the payments system. In mainland China, it is difficult to get any service without WeChat Pay. Tencent has now opened the system to international credit cards but levies a 3 per cent fee. It does exempt bills of up to 200 yuan (US$28), which is a nice gesture, but for more costly items, 3 per cent is a lot.

Now that more Chinese shops and restaurants accept international credit cards, it is cheaper for foreign tourists to pay directly with these. Tencent should adjust its system so the retailer pays the credit card fee regardless of how the customer charges their credit card.

Yet another area to improve is the railway service. China’s high-speed rail network is an outstanding piece of transport infrastructure and ought to be a tourist attraction in its own right. Although the hardware is world class, however, the software needs improvement.

Here are three suggestions that could attract more tourists and improve the service for domestic travellers too. First is the reservation system. The current system limits bookings to just 15 days in advance. That might be OK for locals, but foreign tourists often need to plan ahead.
China Railway could copy airlines’ reservation system, which allows bookings up to 11 months in advance. And to accommodate people travelling at short notice, some seats could be reserved for booking nearer the time of travel.

Another hurdle to booking rail tickets is the need for a Chinese mobile number. That forces foreigners to buy tickets through travel agents. Supporting travel agents should not be the purpose of the system. Instead, it should accept foreign mobile numbers.

Second is the boarding procedure. Station staff open the gates for check-in just 15 minutes before departure. During my recent trip from Shanghai Hongqiao station to Hangzhou, boarding degenerated into a mad rush in the last few minutes. China can surely do better.

The time allowed for boarding should take into account the expected number of passengers. For instance, a train originating from a major city such as Shanghai will need longer. Another way would be to provide more gates for ticket inspection as that seems to be the main bottleneck.

My final suggestion for the railways is a minor one, but it would help many foreigners. Rather than translate station names strictly in pinyin, the geographical features should be translated into English. For instance, Beijingnan should be rendered as Beijing South and Hangzhoudong as Hangzhou East. Such renaming might even help Chinese learn a bit of English.

The article first appeared in SCMP.